I feel like after we nuke/bio-engineered disease/both ourselves out of existence, after a few tens of millions of years, the crows and the octopuses are going to set up a really cool joint civilization

The Placebo Effect fascinates me, because we do know it's real and that the body (for at least some people) has - in theory - far greater real powers of self-healing than is normally credited. But It's like a macro-world manifestation of quantum uncertainty, whereby it usually only works if you don't know what's going on - or even that it IS going on.

In more notable cases, the human body has performed feats of self-healing so staggering that they were described by doctors as physically impossible, and by lay people as miracles. The idea that we could actually isolate and reliably replicate such processes carries vast medical potential. Even if it turns out to be something we still will have no way of controlling, just understanding the biochemical mechanism at work would still be an incredible scientific achievement.

Funny enough, I don't know if this would actually translate to a pill. It may not even be something we can make use of until/unless genetic profiling becomes a standard part of regular medical care, due to the widespread introduction of individually-tailored drugs.

One story of yours that really amazed me was how in virtual reality, you can attach a tail to someone and they immediately know how to control it. I wonder if that relates to the inbetweenness you’re describing.

JL:

The fact that you can take on different body plans and still control your body is one of the most startling and surprising results of virtual-reality research. It’s probably the most significant scientific discovery to come out of virtual-reality research, actually.

It was known before that you could alter the body to a degree, because of phantom limb research and other related investigations. But the notion that you could radically reorganize the body and the brain could still control it was not something that could have been tested before. And it is remarkable. One thing that's probably going on is that the brain remembers body forms that our ancestors inhabited, because as far as the brain is concerned evolution is a slow, gradual process. So the brain remembers what it was like to have a tail.

There have been a few different experiments with putting a tail on a person in virtual reality. But the best, most rigorous work came out of Mel Slater's lab at University College London. That particular tail was a really good tail. It was a long tail. And the task was to get it to whip around in front of you to hit a target. So it was a pretty non-trivial bit of athleticism with your tail. And people can just do it. I mean, it's natural. Everybody's brain knows how to run a tail.

The more striking experiments involved changing people into completely different creatures with different numbers of limbs, or with limbs attached strangely. And there you start to see a kind of jigsaw puzzle, where there are some body designs that brains can control and some that it seems that they can't. What we're unveiling is the brain's own cartography. We’re discovering what world the brain thinks it's inhabiting, or what body it thinks it's part of. And the body that your brain thinks it's part of is not just your body at the moment—it's a multi-million-year stream of changing bodies.

"Remember" is kind of a poor word here, and it actually UNDERsells what the body is doing, but you get the idea.

Some of it could be just basic kinesthetic knowledge about how to move in order to send a weighted flexible pool noodle attached to your back, in a certain direction, such that its momentum carries it maximally in front and creates a whiplash effect. Kind of like, we need only a little training to get a hula hoop in motion and in stable gyroscopic orbit around our midriff. A brief survey of nature shows very few organisms with naturally-occurring hula hoop appendages - it's just learning basic physics and movement skills.

The better test might be asking those same participants to twitch just the end of their tails, or keep the tail in an upcurved arc while twitching the entire tail forward, or curl the tail around their sleeping body.

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